Your move, explained in words

Chess engines are brutally honest and utterly unhelpful at the same time. They tell you the position is −1.8 after your knight jump — and leave you alone with a number, an arrow, and a line of moves you'd never find over the board. Fine for a grandmaster; for the rest of us the real question stays unanswered: what did my move actually do?

Kingside's analysis board now answers that question in plain text. On the Metrics tab there's a new switch: Diagrams | Comment. Pick any move of your game and the Comment view writes a short verbal report about it — instantly, right in your browser.

What it looks like

Take a classic trap from the Two Knights Defense: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Nxd5? — the natural recapture that loses to the Fried Liver. Click that move, open the comment:

Nxd5. Tactics: attacked the undefended knight g5, took the pawn d5; but walked into the attack of bishop c4, left the pawn h7 under attack of knight g5, Black's pawn on d5 is left without reliable protection. Strategy: strengthened the king's cover, cramped White; but White's bishop c4 took aim at the enemy king's zone. Stronger was b5: the bishop c4 would be hanging — attacked by pawn b5. In reply comes Nxf7: took the pawn f7, attacked the queen d8, attacked the rook h8.

Every phrase is a concrete, checkable fact about the position. The board highlights the squares and pieces the text talks about, so you can see each claim with your own eyes.

How to read it

The comment is built from four blocks:

• Tactics — what changed by force: captures, threats created and lifted, pieces left hanging, checks available. The good news first, the downsides after the «but».
• Strategy — the slower currents: pawn structure, king safety, piece activity, control of squares.
• Stronger was… — the engine's preferred alternative, described the same verbal way: what that move would have achieved.
• In reply comes… — the most likely answer to your move and what it does to you.

No language model involved

Here's the part we're proud of: there is no AI text generator behind this. The commentary is assembled from an evaluation trace of Stockfish 18 running as WebAssembly in your own browser, cross-checked with the Maia model for human-likely replies. Facts in, sentences out — a dictionary of chess phrases, not a neural network improvising.

That design choice buys three things:

1. No hallucinations. Every sentence corresponds to something the engine actually measured. If the comment says your bishop is hanging, it is.
2. It's instant and free. No server round-trip, no tokens, no queue. The move delta appears immediately; engine lines finish within a couple of seconds in the background.
3. It works on every single move — yours, your opponent's, a 40-move endgame grind. Switch moves and the comment recomputes.

One honest caveat: engine lines involve search, and search has a bit of randomness — recompute the same move and the «stronger was» suggestion may occasionally differ. That's the engine being an engine, not a bug.

Try it on your own game

Open the analysis board, make some moves or load a game, open Metrics in the sidebar and switch to Comment. Works in English and Russian.

If a move of yours ever made you wonder «okay, but why is this bad?» — now the board just tells you.